68
PARTISAN REVIEW
the stifling atmosphere of the court chambers. These dim and obstructed
quarters, like the anguish of those whom the quest for justice confines
within them, Kafka describes with his usual flair for the anatomy of
frustration. Finally, the deviousness of the process is symbolized (pre-
cisely as in
The Castle)
by the bureaucratic character of the courts, with
their hierarchies, their baffling system of rituals and privileges. To the
inner strongholds of this officialdom women provide K. with a partial
access, playing as in
The Castle
the role of intercessors for the protagon-
ist and yielding to his aggressive eroticism with a dreamlike ease. All
these factors in the tortuous process of justice, a defendant must take
into account if he is to make headway with his case. Yet Kafka's point
is that
even then
he cannot make any headway, and that unless he is
ready to submit to profound humiliations, a complete reordering of his
personality, his case
never
comes up and he dies without a trial. The two
laws, human and divine, are mutually incongrous. Such are the condi-
tions of Kafka's universe. If
The Castle
sometimes brought to mind the
Homeric world, with its wayward Olympian hierarchy, ravishing and
persecuting mortals but winning their devotion all the same,
The Trial
suggests the more naked austerities of the Old Testament, where terrorism
is the single source of divine authority.
It is not easy to decide to what extent the religious element in
Kafka's work is to be taken as the decisive factor. From the few bio-'
graphical details available it appears that Kafka was himself a mystic.
I take it that mysticism provided him with a final source of value, but
that his novels have by intention a powerful secular reference as well.
Rejecting the dessicated individualism of the wasteland he raised in its
place a set of values derived partly from the past and partly from con-
temporary religious metaphysicians such as the Dane, Kierkegaard. A
similar act of substitution has become almost a classic procedure with
artists under a disintegrating social order; and that even now it has not
exhausted its possibilities is shown, for example, by the recent work of
Silone. Yet, though Kafka measures man by the rigidities of an histor.
ically obsolete theology, he must give contemporary emphases to his work
and take his materials from the world around him. So it happens that
he criticizes not so much man in the abstract as contemporary man. And
from this contradiction, which his genius only aggravated, there flows
the uncanny clairvoyance that is typical of his work. It is probably not
by chance that the accent falls, less on the raptures of those who enjoy
grace, than on the miserable isolation of the unblessed; nor that the ideal
most eloquently dramatized by Kafka is the ideal of community. And
what of his symbols? It was hardly an accident that he hit upon the
modern bureaucratic state to represent the forces that stand between
man and his desires; nor that he saw the judicial trial as the most acute
expression of the relations between the official caste and the humble
individual. His ideas, like his metaphors, are two-edged. They have a
human as well as a supernatural incidence. The problem of grace is, in
human terms, only the problem of freedom; which in the long run is
a question of the social adjustment of the individual. Historically, the
struggle for the community itself takes precedence over the question of
individual adjustment; but literature may, if it wishes, reverse the order
of history.
Few writers, at any rate, have set out to assault so many, and such
